Fanny and Alexander has been on my radar for a while. It pops up rather frequently on different YouTube videos doing “best of” lists, and I don’t mean the ones that seem to just toss off something like nine recent films and an old standard in an attempt to make the whole thing look legitimate. No, these are videos produced by serious film buffs who have a lot to say about all kinds of films. The thing is, there are actually two versions of Fanny and Alexander. One is a three hour theatrical cut. The other is a five hour version that was originally broken up into four parts for Swedish television. Consensus seemed to be both were excellent films, but the five hour cut was actually the superior one. I can’t find much information about what was cut from the three hour version, but I know The Criterion Channel had both versions of what writer/director Ingmar Bergman had initially intended to be his cinematic swan song.
Naturally, I went for the five hour version. The episodic structure meant I watched in in installments over three days, but that was the one I went with. And it’s still not the longest film in the challenge.
Regardless, Bergman’s work is something that I feel I should be more familiar with. My first exposure to him, so to speak, was a punchline on an episode of Family Ties where one of the Keatons described spending time with a gloomy, fatalistic cousin as like being like living with someone from an Ingmar Bergman film. Of course, I have seen exactly one of Bergman’s films before, and that’s The Seventh Seal. I rather like The Seventh Seal, in part because it’s nowhere near as gloomy as I was expecting it to be and is arguably a celebration of life in places. Naturally, I’ve seen The Seventh Seal parodied many times over, from Animaniacs to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, so his work has a lot of recognition in the United States even for people who’ve never seen The Seventh Seal.
Case in point: in 2020, I did a year-long Facebook challenge, initially spawned out of a 30 day challenge meme, where I would recommend a film a day, often with an image, based on criteria laid out by friends and family. I chose The Seventh Seal one day with an image of that film’s Death, and then my sister confessed in the comments she thought it was from Bogus Journey. There’s a reason a lot of comedic versions of the Grim Reaper have Swedish accents, or at least the comedic version that most Americans think of as Swedish.
But that’s a whole different film. What’s Fanny and Alexander‘s whole thing? In short, it’s a semi-autobiographical story from Bergman where he has a stand-in in the form of ten year old Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve). Alexander essentially watches his beloved father Oscar (Allan Edwall) die suddenly and the subsequent remarriage of his mother Emilie (Ewa Fröling) to Bishop Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö). Coming along for the ride, so to speak, is Alexander’s younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). Fanny is based on Bergman’s sister, the Swedish novelist Margareta Bergman while the Bishop was based on their biological father Erik, a member of the Lutheran church.
That actually makes for an interesting comparison, so to speak, and says quite a bit about Bergman’s own childhood. Life in Alexander’s original home is like something out of a pleasant dream. Oscar is a prominent stage actor from a family of prominent stage actors, and his home is colorful and bright, full of whimsy and wonder as it encourages storytelling as an artform. The Bishop’s house is like the dictionary definition of austere. It’s primary color scheme seems to be gray, Edvard is himself humorless and given to lecturing on righteousness (particularly his own), and even before he lays a finger on young Alexander, it should be clear that he’s not going to be an ideal stepfather. I’m left then to wonder how much Bergman wishes he had a father like Oscar and not one like Edvard, even if the film shows there is an eventual way out from under Edvard’s thumb. The implication seems to be the only reason Emlie married Edvard in the first place was she wanted away from the old life that reminded her of the dead Oscar, giving up the stage for herself and stepping away from the theater to someone who couldn’t have been more different if he tried. The story takes place over, if I were to hazard a guess, the course of about a year as measured by a subplot involving a maid named Maj (Pernilla August). Maj has caught the eye of Oscar’s philandering brother Gustav (Jarl Kulle), and their story starts with Maj and Gustav together where Maj says she doesn’t want to be in the family way but ends the film with her having an infant daughter by Gustav.
By the by, Maj looked familiar to me in a vague sort of way when I saw her. I looked the actress up, and it was someone I had seen before: Pernilla August played Anakin Skywalker’s mother in two of the Star Wars prequel films. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere about how she spends much of her screentime in Fanny and Alexander becoming a mother or who Anakin’s real father was, but that’s not one I am quite interested in making right now. It feels too obvious.
Now, like I said, I am unsure how much of what I saw made it into the three hour theatrical cut, but I will add the mini-series does one thing particularly well: it shows just how enchanting Alexander’s life was before his father died. The first episode, the longest of the four, is essentially just the Ekdahl family Christmas celebration, one where the family, the theater people, and even the household’s servants all gather for a shared meal and talk to each other with what looks like servants sitting in between more formally dressed guests to the point where one maid is explaining to another guest exactly how to prepare a certain meal with both parties invested in the telling. Everyone is welcome in the Ekdahl house. And while not all is perfect here, most of the issues come from Oscar’s two brothers. The aforementioned Gustav is a womanizer. Carl (Börje Ahlstedt) is the poor brother, and he tends to take things out on his own devoted wife. In fact, both Carl and Gustav’s wives seem to be incredibly understanding of their respective husband’s personal faults. It actually makes the pregnant Maj welcome in the family matriarch’s home, and the person who has the most issues with Maj seems to be Gustav and not Gustav’s wife Alma (Mona Malm).
Still, even with those glaring faults, the Ekdahl house is lightyears beyond Edvard’s, a place where a boy can be caned for lying and then once more for refusing to apologize to the Bishop for putting that man of God through such a trying ordeal as whacking a boy’s bare bottom with a cane.
I don’t know if “villain” is the right word to use for Edvard in a film like this, but it’s a good word to describe him in many ways. This isn’t the sort of film that conceivably has heroes and villains, but you would be hard-pressed to find a better one. Even before he marries Emilie, he is lecturing Alexander on morals and honesty. His demands, again for lack of a better word, seem a little controlling early on, and then as soon as Emilie has to take a trip somewhere, his idea of keeping the children out of trouble is to lock them in a mostly bare bedroom/nursery until their mother gets home days later. He’s stern, self-righteous, and a huge antisemitic as seen when a Jewish friend of the Ekdahl family comes by with a (successful) plan to smuggle Fanny and Alexander out of Edvard’s house and over his his all-purpose shop to live. When Carl and Gustav attempt to negotiate a divorce agreement between Emilie and Edvard on her behalf, even the threat of public disgrace or an offer to assist Edvard with his personal debts amounts to nothing. He is unmoving and certain of his own righteousness. Emilie can’t leave him because the law would favor him in a custody battle, and the big reason she wants out is to protect her two kids (with a third by the bishop on the way). Meanwhile, Alexander is seeing his dead father wandering around, a suggestion that he may be seeing ghosts or he has an active imagination.
That his grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren) also sees her dead son at one point makes me wonder a bit about that.
Bergman is tackling some interesting themes here. Emilie and her children are happiest when she is involved with the theater. It’s when, during her grief over Oscar’s death, that she steps away from the stage that she remarries, and when she is a widow twice-over (Edvard’s off-screen death is almost too ridiculous, but it likewise fits the ideas of the film), she goes back to the stage and her first husband’s family a happier woman. Edvard still haunts Alexander–Edvard’s own ghost slaps the boy upside the head with a message that Alexander will never be free of the dead man–but that could be as much psychological as supernatural. There’s the idea that Edvard’s death was somehow Alexander’s doing because if he fantasizes hard enough, it could happen. Oscar suffers the stroke that eventually kills him while rehearsing for a stage play where he was the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a point even he says at one point is rather ironic. The theater, and presumably the art of storytelling in general, is treated as magical, and magic isn’t always joyful. And for all Alexander seems to see the wonder of storytelling, his experiences with religion have him on what looks like the road to atheism.
What does all this mean for Alexander? Fanny, arguably, does not have much to do but witness what happens to her brother, but for Alexander, I’d say he learned a few lessons about reality, fantasy, and whether or not there’s a God. It’s hard to say what will become of the boy, but I think the implication at least is both his father and stepfather will greatly shape the man he will become. That just might be a man who will make a film where a knight plays chess with Death.
NEXT: It looks like I’ll be going to another foreign director whose work I feel I should know. Be back soon for the final part of a loose French trilogy with 1994’s Three Colours: Red.
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